Blowing up the Gin Room Blowing up the ...

In the summer of 1977, I was 19 years old. I moved out of my parents' house and in to a dump of a three-bedroom house on the bad side of Peoria, IL. My two roommates were Chris and Moon, and the main thing we had in common was a powerful thirst for all things alcoholic. Our drinks of choice were Blatz beer and shots of cheap gin.

To fortify ourselves in the midst of so much alcohol consumption, we bought more than a thousand hits of speed and kept them in a large candy dish on a crumbling second-hand coffee table in the front room. Whenever we felt weary from the constant drinkathon, we'd pop a couple hits of speed and boom, it was back to the liquor store.

Our dilapidated house had a basement that was divided into two rooms. One had a door, but it also had a window on the outer wall. Since the basement was musty and came furnished with a variety of insects and rodentia, we didn't spend a lot of time down there. We did, however, turn the sealed room into something we called The Gin Room. We dubbed it this because we would take our empty gin bottles and smash them on the cracked cement floor.

After a couple of months, the broken glass was nearing ankle height. It was really something to see. Smashing the bottles was a great release when you were about to jump out of your skin from too much amphetamines and alcohol.

Being constantly drunk and raging on speed leads to some weird behavior and weirder releases. Once, Chris and I turned everything in the house upside down and watched the sunrise while debating whether or not it would be a good idea to hang meat from the ceiling. But the greatest release came sometime in August when Moon came home clutching a large shopping bag.

"You're not going to believe what I've got in here," he announced to me and Chris, a curious grin creeping across his face.

"Girl Scouts?"

"I've got enough fireworks here to blow up a tank."

A friend owed Moon 100 bucks, and when Moon threatened to break the headlights on his car if he didn't pay up, the guy offered him the fireworks, and the deal was done. There on the floor were M-80s, firecrackers, Roman candles, cherry bombs and things I didn't recognize.

We huddled around the explosive pile, and it became painfully obvious what was to be done.

With seven Blatzes and three shots of gin swimming around in my system, my suggestion to blow up the gin room seemed somehow noble. Of course, Chris and Moon were in total agreement, and we moved the artillery downstairs and set it up on a pile of newspapers that would act as a mass fuse.

But first, celebratory drinks. And a handful of speed.

When the crank had kicked in, we moved to the basement and argued over who would light the newspaper. (Moon won, as they were his fireworks and all.) The fire set, we quickly exited and watched the action from the outer window. Soon, an orgasm of colorful explosions, smoke, fire and ear-shattering bangs and booms belched out of the room. After a minute, the glass on the window cracked and fell out. After four minutes, it was over.

Four minutes. Of pure joy. Pure joy unfettered by the everyday worries that were magnified ten times by the booze and speed. Worries about money, a busted-up car, a dead-end job at a downtown discount store, running out of cigarettes, the question of what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and the greatest worry of all?would we make it to the liquor store before closing time. Nothing mattered but the colorful explosion in the gin room.

It took two minutes to put the fire out on the left wall. The whole room was covered in black soot. In fact, the whole house had a smoky gunpowder scent that we would never be able to eliminate. A month later, we were thrown out. Needless to say, we didn't recover our security deposit.

Moon went on to become a financial director for a loan company. Chris went back to college and became a lawyer. I moved to New York and went to work at a shitty night job while trying to peddle my writing.

I still like to blow things up.